Any day now the 11,000th visitor will wander into a small shopping arcade off the bedraggled main street of Sittingbourne in Kent, between the cash-for-gold jeweller's and the discount shop selling bales of cheap loo rolls, set down their shopping bags, and watch the history of Kent being rewritten.

An empty premises last used as a Christmas shop is now CSI Sittingbourne, an improvised laboratory where volunteers including – on this visit – teachers, housewives, a prison officer, students, a surgeon, pensioners and young mothers, are doing museum quality conservation work on spectacular finds from a major Anglo Saxon cemetery just outside the town. The cemetery, a find of international importance, came as a shock to Canterbury Archaeological Trust which had been keeping a rather bored watching brief on a building site believed to have been scoured clean by Victorian brick-clay diggers.

But thousands of objects have poured from hundreds of graves, some of royal quality. Volunteers have worked on beautiful garnet-and-gold jewellery, a gilt bronze buckle and sword mount strikingly like the Staffordshire hoard which caused world wide excitement last year, amber and glass jewellery, pots and jars, and two cow-horn shaped Frankish drinking glasses buried at either side of their proud owner's head. The volunteers are all trained and supervised by a highly experienced professional, Dana Goodburn-Brown, who is also a local resident and a force of nature. She has ruthlessly scavenged from former employers: the display cases came from an exhibition in Poland, the Museum of London loaned equipment. Tesco, the mall owner, has just extended use of the shop, rent, electricity and security free, so the work goes on at least until Christmas.

So far Goodburn-Brown has logged more than 1,200 volunteer hours, worth almost £250,000 if done professionally. The garnet brooch they cleaned may have lain on the breast of a princess, but more modest finds are also crucial. Desiccated insects, grass and fabric fibres may eventually help prove a gruesome theory that some Anglo Saxon dead lay in their graves for days or weeks, dressed in their finest and surrounded by their treasures, for friends and relatives to visit before they were finally buried.

"I've found a bug!" grandmother Sylvia Blackwell says, waving her scalpel. "This is one of the most exciting days of my life."